Dan Parkinson - Hammer and Axe

In a glance, Willen saw that the man had been standing on a flat stone, levitated upward by sorcery. And there were three others still on the stone. Willen rolled aside as a spiked cudgel smashed down upon the wall where he had been and saw Barek Stone’s sword flick past him to skewer the second attacker. The third was raising a sword when a heavy lens tube bounced off the side of his head, hurling him from the stone. Then Willen was face-to-face with the one man remaining on the floating stone, and his eyes narrowed. The man was unarmed, but by his stance and his look of concentration, the chief of chiefs knew him. A wizard. The man started to mutter a spell, and suddenly someone dashed past Willen, over the wall and onto the flying stone.

Quill Runebrand, babbling in his excitement, grabbed the wizard’s beard, pulled his head down, and thrust the small end of a lens tube roughly into his mouth. The spell was never completed, and the man’s levitation-hold was broken. The stone plunged downward, and Willen grabbed wildly. A hundred and fifty feet below, stone and wizard thudded onto the downward slope as Willen Ironmaul, belly-down on the ledge wall, clung to the wrist of a flailing, kicking lorekeeper.

With a heave, the big Hylar pulled Quill to safety and stared at him in disbelief. “Are you a complete fool?” he demanded. “Jumping out onto the floating stone was . . .”

“Stones don’t float.” Quill glared at his chief. “It’s just as Damon said. Magic exists, but it isn’t real.”

“And that stone wasn’t up here, floating in the air with people riding on it?”

“Of course not. Stones don’t do that.”

“Then what kind of imbecile jumps onto a stone that doesn’t float, a hundred and fifty feet up in the air?”

“That’s the point,” Quill started, then went pale above his whiskers. “Oh. Uh, well. . . .” He stood on tiptoes to look over the wall at the slope below. There, straight down, were the fragments of the fallen stone and the crushed bodies of three human mercenaries and a wizard. “Gods!” Quill muttered.

All along the ramparts, guards were watching for more floating stones, but no others appeared.

“We count at least two dozen unarmed humans down there,” a spotter reported. “We assume they’re wizards. But they are scattered all over. The only group we see is down past the bluff. Six of them . . . no, seven now . . . have gotten together. They are arguing or something. They . . . Uh-oh!”

“What?” Willen turned.

“That group of wizards.” A dwarf with a lens tube pointed. “They were right down there. Then they all said something together, and they just disappeared.”

Above the heads of the dwarves, the air seemed to crackle for an instant, and a Theiwar guard turned toward the gate. “They’ve gotten inside,” he said. “Somehow, they’ve transported themselves past us. They are in Thorbardin.”

Behind the ledge, beyond the huge gate, there were shouts and the sounds of pounding feet, then the unmistakable rattle of missiles flying from murder holes within the great chamber of Anvil’s Echo. Moments passed, and dwarves ran from the open gate, waving excitedly. “There are humans in the main tunnel!” the first one reported. “We don’t know how they got there. They just. . . just suddenly appeared.”

“How many?” Barek Stone demanded.

“Ah . . .” The new arrivals glanced at one another, whispered together, and the first one said, “Seven, we think. At least there were. Three of them appeared on the catwalk. The other four were just beyond. The three on the catwalk are dead now, but the other four vanished again, and we don’t know where they are.”

“Inside,” Willen muttered.

More dwarves were pouring out from Southgate now—hundreds of them, as though fleeing for their lives.

“What are you people doing?” Barek Stone demanded. “Where are you going?”

“Out here,” a Daewar said. “Gem Bluesleeve’s orders. He said if any humans got in, past the gate and the catwalk, then everybody in the gatehouse was to get outside.”

From the great, gaping gateway came an ominous rumbling sound, like the turning of a gigantic screw within sockets. A last few dwarves scampered from the opening, and the massive gate-plug drove itself into place just behind them, sealing the gate with a solid wall of steel-clad stone. The chunk of its closing had a hollow, final sound.

“Well, that does it,” Willen muttered. “Damon said to trust Gem Bluesleeve. I guess now we have no choice.”

The sight of the great gate closing drew stares all along the upper and lower slopes, and the fighting there renewed itself as howling gangs of humans surged forward against the advancing dwarves. Within a minute, fierce hand-to-hand conflict raged all along the swale below the ramparts and out onto the slopes on either side.

On the eastern embankments, a battalion of masked Daergar massed a charge at a rank of human fighters, hitting them so fiercely that they went all the way through the line, then found themselves cut off from retreat as the humans closed in behind them. For long moments it was a standoff—the humans battered and bloody, hesitating to subject themselves again to such ferocity, while the steel-masked dwarves formed a tight ring and waited for the attack. Then from the ring a square, burly dwarf with massive wrists stepped forward, holding a bloody miner’s pick.

Pyrr Steelpick, boss of the shafts, was thoroughly exasperated with the entire situation. Pointing a blunt finger at the nearest humans, he shouted, “What do you people think you’re doing here? Why don’t you go home where you belong?”

The challenge was so unexpected that the humans just stared at him, and some started laughing.

“Well,” the irritated miner demanded, “why are you here?”

“For money, dink,” a tall warrior shouted back. “We fight for hire.”

“What kind of money?” Pyrr goaded the man. “Rocks?”

“Good coin, dink!” the man said. He pulled forth a shiny coin and held it high. “This kind of money!”

“That’s nothing but a pebble!” the Daergar jeered.

“Pebble?” The man looked at his coin, frowning. “This is no pebble! This is a bronze hundred-point coin!”

“Do you all have them?”

“Of course we all have them! We don’t fight for free!”

Scowling behind his mask, Pyrr pointed his pick toward a dead human lying almost at the man’s feet. “Does he have coins like that? Take a look at them!”

Curious, and glad for the chance to regain his breath before fighting dwarves again, the man crouched beside the fallen body and withdrew a pouch from the dead man’s tunic. “Here they are,” he said. “See, we all have. . .”

He had opened the pouch, and upended it. The men around him stared in disbelief. What fell from the pouch was nothing more than a few pebbles.

“You’ve been swindled,” the dwarf snapped. “Those wizards don’t have any coins. They make stones look like coins, but they’re still only stones. I’ve seen that before. You people have been fighting and dying for pebbles.”

Out on the Promontory, Damon Omenborn and the Roving Guard watched in fascination as the enthroned wizard, Kistilan, floated toward them. The chair in which he sat was an elaborate, ornate high-backed thing, encrusted with gems and bits of bright metal. The wizard was a large man, his features shadowed by a wide, dark hat. When he was a hundred feet away, the chair settled to a position a dozen feet above the ground, and Kistilan gazed at the armed dwarves and their sleeping captives. “Fools,” he muttered. “Overcome by simple dwarves!”

“Speak up, spell-crafter!” the nearest dwarf demanded. “I can’t hear you.”